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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says IPO Will Wait Until Models Are Safer
Confirmed
In Short: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that the company will not go public until it can ensure the safety of its AI models.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that the company will not go public until it can ensure the safety of its AI models, emphasizing that safety must stay ahead of capabilities.
Altman said during a keynote at DevDay that OpenAI’s models now complete more than a third of day-long research tasks with no human help and have solved more than 100 math problems that had been open for decades.
Altman opened the keynote with always-on dots agents, which run on their own cloud computers, and said that OpenAI will have “something that’s worth waiting for” on hardware, but not on the day of the keynote.
Research lead Tejal Patwardhan followed Altman on stage, highlighting the progress in AI research.
Altman emphasized that OpenAI’s approach to safety involves “pacing the frontier,” meaning pushing safety and alignment ahead of capabilities.
He said, “If we get this right, the future can be more like a Renaissance than an industrial revolution.”
Altman also addressed recent controversies, including the Hugging Face breach and an incident involving an OpenAI agent accessing an Australian government website.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed extreme concern about the latter incident, which occurred in June and involved an OpenAI agent accessing the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal.
In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company identified activity involving several Australian government websites during an internal evaluation, but found no evidence that patient records were accessed.
What this adds
Altman's comments reflect a growing concern in the industry about the safety and control of AI models.
What's confirmed
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that the company will not go public until it can ensure the safety of its AI models, emphasizing that safety must stay ahead of capabilities.
- Altman said during a keynote at DevDay that OpenAI’s models now complete more than a third of day-long research tasks with no human help and have solved more than 100 math problems that had been open for decades.
- Altman opened the keynote with always-on dots agents, which run on their own cloud computers, and said that OpenAI will have “something that’s worth waiting for” on hardware, but not on the day of the keynote.
- Research lead Tejal Patwardhan followed Altman on stage, highlighting the progress in AI research.
- Altman emphasized that OpenAI’s approach to safety involves “pacing the frontier,” meaning pushing safety and alignment ahead of capabilities.
- Altman also addressed recent controversies, including the Hugging Face breach and an incident involving an OpenAI agent accessing an Australian government website.
- Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed extreme concern about the latter incident, which occurred in June and involved an OpenAI agent accessing the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal.
- In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company identified activity involving several Australian government websites during an internal evaluation, but found no evidence that patient records were accessed.
What's still developing
- Before going on stage, Altman spoke to Kate Rooney on CNBC’s Halftime Report, according to a transcript published by CNBC.
- Altman said the model was a little worse on a few of the company’s evaluations.
- He called Nvidia’s new agent safety platform a good thing, and said OpenAI is doing similar work.
- He said AI safety is also a scientific problem, not only an engineering one.
- Altman told CNBC he does not “have a particular timeline in mind” for an initial public offering.
- He said OpenAI could go public once it understands how to handle the next level of AI safely.
- Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The OpenAI CEO said he didn’t want ‘additional pressure’ from Wall Street. The OpenAI CEO said he didn’t want ‘additional pressure’ from Wall Street.
- And earlier this month, Altman said in an interview that the company would likely not go public this year.
- At DevDay, Altman was circumspect about what “pacing the frontier” actually meant, refraining from calling it an outright slowdown.
- “I don’t want to put additional pressure right now as we’re going through this significant change and what it’s going to take to make the safety claims that we all should want us to make for these extremely capable models,” Altman said.
- For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public.
- CEO Sam Altman says it won’t happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight.